Dispatch dev puts out lengthy statement about Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 versions, planning update to restore censored content

After what’s been a controversial past few days – to say the least – for the Nintendo Switch 2 and Switch versions of Dispatch, developer AdHoc has followed up with a lengthy statement of its own.

We technically already heard from the studio a few days ago, but that was a brief message. Now the team has taken to Discord and provided fans with a big explanation and hope regarding a future update.

There’s been a lot of back and forth here about who’s to blame regarding Dispatch’s censorship on Nintendo platforms. However, AdHoc has now said that the game didn’t meet the Big N’s guidelines. This is despite other games such as Cyberpunk 2077 having nudity.

The big news now is that AdHoc is “already working with Nintendo on a path forward.” The team is planning “an update to address at least some of the censored content.” Note that it will likely take weeks to be released.

The full statement reads as shared on the official Discord:

We’ve been quiet for the last few days not because we don’t want to address this stuff, but because we’ve been trying to make sure we’re being good partners with Nintendo. They’ve made their own statement regarding this issue (see here).

As Nintendo states, any game that’s going to be on the Nintendo platform needs to ‘meet [Nintendo’s] established content and platform guidelines.’ This is the key point. Nintendo has content guidelines. Our game didn’t meet those guidelines, so we made changes that would allow us to release on their platform. That’s what happened here. Honestly we thought this would be obvious since we’re the devs that released the fully uncensored version of the game on other platforms.

We initially assumed, like some of you, that because games like Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk are on the platform with similar types of uncensored mature content, Dispatch would be allowed to do the same. During the porting process it became clear that was not the case. So we asked that we include a disclaimer on the store page to inform customers that content would be different than on other platforms. We worked with Nintendo to get storefront language approved.

Where we absolutely need to take full ownership is the placement of that disclaimer. Again, it was our intent to go out of our way to tell people looking to buy the game that the content was censored. While we didn’t have complete control of the language, we did have control of the placement. Wires got crossed and we put the disclaimer in the field literally titled “Disclaimer”, instead of the “About The Game” section. We didn’t catch this until after the launch when we saw people saying we should have called out the changes on the store page, and we went to go make sure it was there. It technically has been the entire time, just in the absolute worst spot that makes it look like we were trying to hide it.

This is 100% our mistake and it was fixed in the Americas store pages a few hours after launch to give more visibility. We’ve also added a disclaimer before purchase. As of writing this, the other regions have either published this change or are in the process of review.

So what now?

We’re already working with Nintendo on a path forward. While we can’t make any specific promises just yet, we’re confident we’ll be able to push an update to address at least some of the censored content. I’ll get ahead of it now and say that between dev time and the console submission process, we’re talking weeks not days.

To our fans who were looking forward to playing the uncensored version on Switch, we’re truly sorry. People have a right to be pissed. Lots of lessons learned here. Thanks for sticking with us. More soon.

What do you make of AdHoc’s statement? Let us know in the comments.